It was a tragic assortment of bats he saw now as he fluttered down into the cavern. He swept the ledges with his echo vision, desperately searching for a banded Silverwing male. Many of the bats still had bits of metal chain dangling from their bellies. Some had wings cruelly clipped by injury; others had large patches of furless scar tissue caused by horrible burns. All had a lean, wild look to them, and none of them was his father.
At least now he knew for certain. His father, like so many others, had died in flames. He was surprised and guilty that he felt so little. He felt like a colossal empty cave without even echoes inside. What was wrong with him?
He looked up as two more bats swept through the entrance tunnel into Statue Haven, and heard Caliban call up to them: “Did you find any other survivors?”
“We searched all around the building for as long as we could. There was no one.”
Shade looked at Chinook. All the life seemed drained from his eyes. Even his body seemed smaller somehow. How was it he could feel only numbness for his own father’s death, but seeing Chinook like this was almost too much to bear? He’d have done anything to get the old Chinook back: boasting, swaggering through the air, calling him Runt.
“I’m sorry, Chinook,” he said, pushing his nose against the other bat’s neck.
“I knew I saw them,” said Chinook dully.
Anger boiled through Shade’s head. You’re such a fool, he raged at himself. Marina lost her parents, and now Chinook has too. You at least always had your mother. Others too: Frieda, Marina, and Chinook. You had a family, but it was never enough. Should’ve just stayed in Hibernaculum with them all, been grateful for having something. Because now what was there?
“You’ve lost family and friends,” Caliban said matter-of-factly. “We all have. But we’re going to survive.”
“How long have you been here?” Shade asked.
“Varies. Some several weeks, some over two months, like me.”
“You haven’t tried to go back north?”
Caliban gave a harsh laugh. “A long journey. You’ve seen what the jungle is like. The bug that nearly ate you was the least of it. There are owls, and snakes big enough to swallow you alive and give you a long look at their gullet before you’re squeezed to death. There’re eagles, falcons, vultures. And the cannibal bats. Thousands of them.”
Even though he’d known, hearing Caliban say it still filled him with dread. Goth by himself had been terrifying enough. Thousands was beyond imagining.
“I know these bats,” Shade said.
“How?” Caliban said.
“There was one the Humans had up north, named Goth. They took him to the same building as us, and chained him with a metal disc, a big one. He got dumped out with us tonight.”
“Chances are he’s dead, then. At least that’s one less.”
“He doesn’t die,” said Shade simply.
Caliban looked at him strangely. “Doesn’t matter either way. There are enough of them to run the night skies. Even the owls stay out of their way.” He shook his head. “The total reverse of what we’re used to. Owls scared of bats. We’ve lost a few to them. Nothing on the number the cannibals have taken, though. They hunt in packs. Just a few weeks ago we were almost fifty here.”
“We’ve got to get back north,” said Chinook, and Shade turned to him in surprise; he’d been so quiet. “We’ve got to try to warn the others before it’s too late. There’s Frieda, and your mother. And Marina too, maybe.”
“No argument,” said Caliban. “And we would have embarked much earlier. But we’ve still got wounded. We’ve had to wait for everyone to heal. No one gets left behind here. That’s the rule. We all stay, or we all go.”
Shade nodded, filled with admiration for this small group of determined bats.
“You two need some rest now if you’re coming with us. There’re some berries I came across that seem to quicken the healing. You’ll want some on your wounds.”
“Thank you,” said Shade. He wanted sleep. Deep sleep that would take him through the weeks and months until he could wake up somewhere else, somewhere safe. With surprise he realized how relieved he felt. Someone else was in charge here, and Shade trusted Caliban on instinct. He didn’t want to make plans anymore; he only wanted to follow orders. All his life he’d never done what he was told; he’d always doubted what others said—and look where it got him. He was finished with all that. Take a break from being a hero. Marina was right. He was tired of the very idea of thinking.
Caliban returned with a berry in his mouth and proceeded to chew it into a paste, and spread it onto Chinook’s stomach.
“Every few weeks,” the big mastiff said, “more bats get dropped over the city. And every time we go see if there’re any survivors. There used to be more. Sometimes the discs wouldn’t explode; sometimes the bats would veer away in time.” He smiled angrily. “The Humans are obviously getting better at it. I’m amazed you two survived. Good thing I found you when I did, though. That place where you roosted was a bug nest. More would have come. I’ve seen them eat each other while mating. The female just bites the male’s head right off. Still, they taste all right.”
“You eat them?” Chinook asked in amazement.
“When we can. Plenty of meat on them. Which is good, because hunting’s tricky here. We go out in twos and threes, and stick close to Statue Haven. Without this place, we wouldn’t have lasted a night in the jungle.”
Caliban mulched up another berry in his mouth and began applying it to Shade’s wound now.
“We were getting ready to leave a few nights back, but then we lost our leader. If anyone could’ve led us back north safely, it was he. I’m just a pale replacement. He was one of the first to get dropped here. Saved me when I came. He’d been in the Human forest for months, and he’d seen some of the things they did to us. Tests.”
“What kinds of tests?” Shade said.
“Making sure the bats were strong enough to carry the discs, figuring out how to make them explode. Getting the sirens to work, and stay in their ears. A lot of bats died in that building, burned to death, or their wings singed so they could never fly again. He survived it all. But the jungle beat him. He was a brave bat. Cassiel saved a lot of us.”
“Cassiel Silverwing?” Shade could hear himself asking the question, as if he were hovering high in the air, watching himself speak.
“That’s right.”
“What happened to him?”
“The cannibals ate him.” Caliban looked at him strangely, and his matter-of-factness faltered for a moment. “You knew him?”
“He was my father.”
Marina flew south.
Every night, Achilles Graywing’s convoy grew as it was joined by other refugees driven from their winter roosts by the owls. Marina felt comforted to be flying with so many bats, even though she knew a single elite platoon of owls could slash a bloody path through their ranks.
She and Ariel tried to talk to all the newcomers, asking them if they’d seen any Human flying machines, either on the ground or in the air, heading south. The answers were vague: The sky was full of Human machinery, going in all directions. Shade could be anywhere by now. Anywhere.
It was getting warmer. They’d left the snow behind, and last night her heart leaped when she saw grass again, and even a few flowers.
But despite the weather, Frieda was flagging. She lagged behind, her breath rattling. Marina and Ariel and the others had started taking turns carrying the Silverwing elder on their backs. Marina was amazed at how little she weighed, as if her ancient bones were starting to hollow out. During the day, she slept long and hard.
Marina looked across her wing at Ariel. Every dawn she combed her hair, and made a fuss of her, asking if she was warm enough, well fed. At first it made Marina feel awkward—she’d spent so much time alone, she wasn’t used to such attention. She was used to taking care of herself and doing things her own way. But she couldn’t deny she liked it. And being so close t
o Shade’s mother was strangely comforting, a way of being close to Shade.
“I should’ve gone with him,” she said hopelessly, probably for the tenth time, she realized. “We’re never going to find him this way.”
Ariel shook her head. “You did the right thing, not going inside that flying machine. Shade made his own decision. You’re not responsible for that. I could never understand why Cassiel did some of the things he did, either. Plain stupidity, I think.”
Marina laughed, then looked off with a frown.
“I should’ve been … I wish I’d been nicer to him beforehand. I guess I was kind of ignoring him.”
Ariel said nothing, but her silence wasn’t questioning, just patient.
“I was ignoring him,” said Marina quickly, with the relief of making a guilty confession, “but only because he was ignoring me. All his searching and moping around, that’s all he did, it was like nothing else existed—and, okay, yes, it turned out he was right about the forest, but—”
“It’s not easy taking second place to a great cause. Cassiel was the same, so wrapped up in the secret of the bands and the Promise, he didn’t see much else.”
“Exactly,” said Marina, relieved. “He got to be so important and he wasn’t making it any easier for me, trying to fit in with all of you. Living alone was one thing—you could sort of resign yourself to it, make your own rules, get set in your ways—but then Shade came along and I got this second chance, and I was afraid of losing it all over again.”
Ariel nodded.
“Yeah, well, I tormented him,” Marina admitted, without being able to conceal a smile. “Chinook paid me a lot of attention, and … it was nice.”
“Of course it was.”
“I don’t know why Shade couldn’t figure it out,” she said irritably. “It just made him even angrier. For a smart bat, he can sure be stupid.”
She remembered Shade’s body moving along that terrible trough in the Human building, and her smile disappeared.
“He’s good at surviving,” she said firmly, but she was looking at Ariel, as if asking an urgent question. “He made it home to Hibernaculum.” She frowned. “But I was there to help him. I doubt he could’ve done it without me. You know what he’s like; he doesn’t think, and he does these stupid things sometimes.”
“I know,” said Ariel gently. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him.”
Dawn approached, and they found roosts high in a forest of cedars. As Marina folded her wings about her, eager for sleep, she saw Frieda alone on a distant branch, very still, peering intently into the brightening sky. What was she looking at? Ariel was already asleep beside her, and Marina didn’t want to wake her. She lit silently from the branch and darted up to the tree’s peak, settling behind Frieda at a respectful distance so as not to startle her. “Do you see them?” Frieda asked, without turning around. Marina followed the elder’s gaze, and in the pale light saw a shimmering mass above a distant stand of flowering trees. What were they? They were too large for insects, and certainly too small for birds. But there were dozens of them, flitting from flower to flower.
“Hummingbirds,” said Frieda.
“Those are birds?” She saw that the elder’s face was grave. Surely she couldn’t be worried that these birds were a threat. They were so tiny. “What’s wrong?”
“The fact they’re here at all,” Frieda replied. “They winter in the far south. To see them here … something must be very, very wrong. Come with me, but be slow, let them see you coming.”
Marina lit from the branch, following Frieda. “We’re going to talk to birds?”
“They aren’t like the rest. They’re so small, they’ve never been at home with other species. They live apart. They eat insects like us, as well as flowers.”
“Flowers?”
“They drink their nectar. And they too have a distrust of the owls. They’ve never fought with us, and we have no quarrel with them.”
They flew well above the treetops, in plain view so the hummingbirds could see their approach.
“I am Frieda Silverwing,” the elder called out. “I mean no harm and ask only to speak with you.”
For a moment, it seemed to Marina as if all the hummingbirds froze motionless in the air, their gossamer wings still, their tiny heads turned toward them. Then, faster than her echo vision, they disappeared.
“Where’d they go?”
“Please, we only want to talk,” Frieda called out again as they circled the tree. “Come no closer, Silverwings.”
Marina looked around in surprise and saw a hummingbird above her head, darting so quickly, she kept losing track of it—side to side, up, down, it could even fly backward. “Why do you risk breaking your dawn curfew to talk with us?”
The hummingbird’s voice was slightly peevish, pitched high, and seemed to vibrate in time to the beat of its wings. How fast were its wingstrokes? Marina wondered in awe. Much faster than bats, maybe a hundred beats a second.
What a fabulous creature it was, she thought in admiration. Slightly smaller than a bat, it seemed to fly almost vertically in the air. Snow-white plumage covered its chest, and gave way to a brilliant patch of feathers around its throat. Its beak was thin as a pine needle, elegantly curved downward at the tip.
Now she could see others reemerging from the trees, dipping their beaks into the flowers. She knew why they had no reason to fear bats, or any other creature, for that matter. They were so alert, and moved so quickly, so effortlessly, they seemed to weigh nothing at all, more an element of the air than creatures of sinew and bone. They could fly forever. She felt a twinge of envy.
“Why are you here, so far from your wintering grounds?” Frieda asked.
“They have been destroyed,” the hummingbird replied simply. “By whom?”
“The Humans, with their interminable fighting. The northern Humans send their flying machines and spray down fire. Our trees have mostly been burned. We have been driven from the jungle, and not just us. Many birds and beasts have fled. You have heard nothing of this?” the bird asked pointedly, its head cocked. It took a few backward skips through the air.
“No,” said Frieda.
“Because there have been rumors,” the hummingbird said in its shrill voice.
“Please tell us,” said Marina, her heart thumping heavily. Human flying machines traveling to the south, carrying fire. Carrying Shade.
“At first the Humans came with many flying machines, low in the sky, and the machines themselves seemed to spit out fire. But the southern Humans shot them down with their own missiles. Several months ago, the northern planes started flying higher, above the clouds, where they couldn’t be attacked. But, still, their fire came down. And it is rumored they are using birds and bats to carry it.”
“You’ve seen this?” Marina asked, her mouth parched. “Not I. But others say they have. You know nothing of this, truly?” Marina looked at Frieda, speechless.
“If this is true, we do not do it willingly,” said Frieda. “The Humans have captured many bats, and owls, and tied metal discs to them. Then they take them away in their flying machines, to the south.”
“The fire pours from these metal discs. That is what I have heard,” said the hummingbird.
“What happens afterward, to the bats?” Marina asked.
“I cannot say. I think they must die, many of them, for the explosions are great. I do not see how they could survive.”
“But you have seen some bats, alive, in the forest?”
“There have always been bats, but much bigger ones than you. The Vampyrum.”
“Vampyrum,” said Marina, knowing what the hummingbird must mean. “Three-foot wingspans. Meat-eaters.”
“Yes.”
Marina shut her eyes so tightly they hurt. Goth and Throbb had come from the south. The Humans were taking the bats to their homeland.
“They used to ignore us in the jungle, but now with their food supplies destroyed, they have turned on us. That is another r
easons we have fled. I am sorry to tell you this news,” said the hummingbird. “It is monstrous of the Humans to use us in this way.”
“Thank you, hummingbird.”
“We know the owls have declared war on you. We will not be fighting alongside them.”
“We are very grateful for that.”
“Good speed,” said the hummingbird, and in a flash, all the birds were gone.
“Marvelous creature,” Frieda murmured to herself. Marina turned wearily after the elder, and flapped her wings listlessly back toward the cedars.
“My colony was right,” she said, near tears. “They were right to banish me after I was banded. All those stupid stories about banded bats disappearing or bursting into flames. They must’ve known somehow, heard rumors or something. They were right. The Humans are evil.”
“At least now we know where the Humans take them,” said Frieda. “The hummingbirds winter in the great southern isthmus. That is where we will find Shade.” If he’s still alive.
Neither of them needed to say it.
“Tomorrow we reach Bridge City,” said Frieda. “Let us try to take some comfort from that.”
But she sounded as worn out and hopeless as Marina felt in her bones.
BRIDGE CITY
Shade hoped this would be the last night he spent in the jungle.
He hunted distractedly, paying more attention to the sky around him than to the insects he was trying to catch. With Chinook and Caliban—who had insisted on accompanying them—he stuck close to Statue Haven, warily snapping up any bugs that looked like they wouldn’t snap back. Anything too big, with too many antennae, or weird markings, or strange odors, he stayed away from. He also avoided the trees because there were snakes, and owls, and more of those bugs that had nearly bitten his head off; he stayed away from the ground because there were giant cats, and who knew what else.
Tomorrow night they were leaving.
That was their plan. For the past three nights they’d discussed it in the twilight and dawn hours inside Statue Haven. Shade knew it was the only chance at survival for any of them. For some reason, after his arrival, the jungle had become even more deadly. Two nights ago they’d lost one bat, and last night, three more. It was the cannibals. Normally they hunted alone, but lately they were traveling in packs, and they were scouring the jungle in some kind of feeding frenzy. Crouched in the narrow entrance-way of Statue Haven one night, Shade had seen them strafing treetops in the near distance, and with a shudder he recognized the familiar outlines of their broad, jagged wings. They’d killed his father.
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